DINGALING – TIME FOR A REFUND

The following could and should set a serious precedent and affect each and every one of us who pays a mobile phone bill. This post is a bit of a follow on to my last year’s epic; BEWARE OF GEEKS BEARING GIFTS.

How many of you just pay your phone bills without ever checking them thoroughly? Mind you, I have asked that question before without much impact at all. How many of you have paid hundreds of Dinars/Dollars to telecom providers for so called ‘data’ which you had no idea you were using? Some of you have even encountered travel bans because of it (reference Bahrain). I have a very close friend who tells me that his wife is currently paying off a hefty $1,500 (600 Dinars) bill in bits monthly all because she didn’t realize that her mobile was set to ‘DATA’ switched on. I know of another Bahraini lady in absolute despair because she has a BD 3,500 bill ($10,000) for roaming charges which she had no idea about. Silly lady you say? Yes, she is, but she is culturally and naively innocent in many ways. She has no idea how telephones work from country to country, no idea that roaming is what it is and she just carried on sending pix and Whatsapping. Duh!! By default, most Post Paid customers are automatically ‘roaming’ enabled, whereas Pre Paid most have to activate it. Another lady I know has a hefty bill from just visiting Dubai, where like inter Europe, it should be near a local call, but it is in fact beyond premium. She was not knowingly using data, but didn’t have a clue about ‘switching roaming data off’. She didn’t even know she had to, or where or how she could do that with her phone. It’s all as slippery as a Soprano’s plot.

Well, any testy lawyers who might happen to read this, me thinks there is a little gold mine in the making if you wish to pursue the cases of what must be thousands of customers who have been duped, with grossly outrageously inflated prices for data which nobody asked for in the first place.

Which is exactly the crux of the issue; you as a consumer never asked for it, never signed a contract to accept it. In fact, you probably had no idea you were being charged horrendous rates, thus in the eyes of any credible, moral, legitimate law these charges are fraudulent; it is as simple as that. In America now, this issue has just been legally addressed and T-Mobile will be ordered to pay back hundreds of millions of dollars of ill-gotten profit to its subscribers, simply because none of them asked or signed for the service, product or data. It is not a ‘loop-hole’ it is blatant scamming. I for one expect this to snowball and the fallout could be stunning, just as Brazil’s 7-1 defeat (predicted by me exactly) by Germany.

However, big business and no doubt media worried about its advertising revenue have apparently closed ranks and publicity is scarce still.

Déjà vu Last year I wrote (and blogged) of a case where in just one month I had been charged over BD 400 by telecos who had billed me just for apparently ‘receiving’ erroneous premium rate text messages and making weird calls, none of which I asked for or indeed subscribed to. Many were never received in the first place and absolutely no calls made, but listed on the bill. Sadly, not a single person appeared to care or respond to my missives, so like always the corporations get clean away with it in Bahrain and elsewhere, except with me. I fought the issue tooth and nail and Zain kindly refunded over BD350 (just under $1,000) having thoroughly investigated and logging that it was not my IMEI number.

The former Lightspeed very reluctantly refunded about $100 never accepting that it was their fault.

Batelco refused outright to refund BD 9 ($23) which would surely have been BD 900 had I not caught it in time. The so-called investigator even lied to me telling me that they had checked and that it was indeed my IMEI number, yet not a single SMS was actually received on that particular phone, all of it being a scam. In the end, I ordered the Visa gateway to block any transactions from my numbers, so tough on the scammers and even tougher on the mobile phone companies who claim up to 40% of the SMS revenue.

Now out of the blue, last month we received a bill for near $400. Batelco told me it was for ‘data off package’. It was a Samsung S4 that had been switched off for a few weeks (while I was away in the States) and on re-charging, unbeknownst to any of us, automatically switched “data on – wireless off’. Within hours, Batelco sent an SMS warning that our ‘credit limit’ was approaching. Who knows, perhaps the phone did some automatic update for just a few megs. These few megs off package are set at an extortionate rate, which is beyond reality and the Telecoms Regulatory Authority should wake up and smell the roses and get this hideous rip-off sorted.

So what anyway? I really don’t care Data on or off, why should we care, we don’t have a package. For 15 years, or more this number has been a constant $5 a month, (BD 2), nobody making any calls on it ever as it is only a relay phone to receive office callers on the land line. Now suddenly the telco wants BD145 for data which should not have been available on that number in the first place. As I advised the Call Centre agent. He said; ‘But you don’t have a package on this phone”. My response was just that; ‘You are absolutely right and obviously not a lot gets past you does it? We never signed for any data on this number and have ‘never’ asked for any and furthermore, we don’t want any data, so whatever scam you are working at whatever stupendously high rate, it isn’t going to work on me’. In effect the T-Mobile ruling will prevail and set the precedent and hopefully worldwide. If you don’t ask for something, don’t sign for something, don’t want something, how the hell can a telecommunications company charge you for it and get away with it? It cannot be legally justified whichever way one looks at it.

There is no such thing as a ‘free phone’ , free laptop, free TV either. The Telecommunications Regulatory Authority do nothing about it, the government is not interested and there are just no advertising morals, let alone standards, so all this marketing scam goes on unabated. It is all just a ploy to hold you hostage for up to 2 years on jumped up contracts which include the price of the device – trust me. No matter where you are, incompetent and deluded dudes calling themselves ‘Marketing Specialists’ rule the roost and get clean away with it, giggling away at the deceit. Hundreds of thousands go alone with it, because it is an easy way to get hire purchase.

I P a lot!

Another pathetic revenue scam is; telecos claiming some sort of ‘difference’ between voice traffic and data. In the past this could be somewhat justified but not since the advent of IP routed traffic on data trunk highways. It is ALL DATA now. You’ve all heard of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and most of us use Skype. There is no difference. It is all ONES AND ZEROS. Everything is routed by a matrix and your telephone number is really nothing much different from an IP address. Once the infrastructure is in place, and it is, it costs no more to link to Los Angeles from Bahrain as it does Riffa to Isa Town. This applies to anywhere else in the developed world. Even outside of that, the delivery method might be slightly different, but taking a call at the North Pole for example, the technology and method is EXACTLY the same nowadays. In fact, look up another blog of mine on ‘Bandwidth’ and test for yourself. In general, Skype has clearer calls than over your mobile phone. If your network speed it slow, then sure it might break up whereas it does not, or should never break on a mobile network, but mobile voice is so muffled in general. It does not have to be because these networks have bandwidth coming out their arses, but they just can’t get past the monopoly and 3 khz doctrine, so why should phone manufacturers concern themselves with hi-fidelity microphones and speakers?

Zain and Viva are playing the HD voice card with 4G, when all could have easily done much better with 3G, but they are all too anal and it is endemic across the world, except perhaps America as was. However with the imported British Telecom and Cable & Wireless mentality in more recent years, with the likes of T-Mobile, nothing creative or abstract is ever considered, until a competitor does it first, then they copy. In recent years, competitors have been non telecom schooled geeks who actually force progress on these dinosaurs holding the world to ransom. Across current telephone networks set to operate as they are, there is no such thing as CD quality voice. Whatever HD is supposed to represent it is all big time BS. For a start, the very cheap all singing, all dancing Chinese switches which seem to be growing ever popular outside of Europe run at a piddly 8 bit – 8 khz highly compressed format. This is standard Huawei format. By comparison CD quality , which is NOT high definition, is of course 44.1. khz – 16 bit. The higher the bit rate, the higher the sampling frequency, obviously the higher the quality.

Back to this 145 Dinars and any one else out there who has been burned; sure they will take my number away and hopefully take me to court eventually to try and recover this amount. This is when the fun will begin and we all need to get together to make it perfectly clear that; No signature, no request, no need, then no money honey either! ‘Off’ being the second word!